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Hosting

Before installing CiviCRM, careful consideration must be given to where it will be hosted. The main options with an outline of the situations in which you would want to choose them, and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so are outlined below:

CiviCRM Spark

CiviCRM Spark is a quick and secure way to get started with CiviCRM. It allows you to get your own installation of CiviCRM up-and-running in minutes. Spark is ideal for organizations of any size wanting to test and trial CiviCRM, or for smaller organizations and activities with up to 2000 contacts.

Recommended hosting providers and implementers

There are implementers and experts in the CiviCRM community able to manage the hosting and/or installation for you. If requested, they may also be available to manage a local implementation and configuration on your premises.

Internal hosting

If you have an internal IT department or staff members with a technical background, you may wish to host CiviCRM internally. To do this, you will likely need:

  • Servers or dedicated PC hardware available to run as a web server, 24x7.
  • A space on premises to permanently store the hardware, possibly air conditioned.
  • An un-interrupted power supply (UPS) to ensure the server is still available during power outages.
  • An internet connection suitable for hosting a website (static IP, sufficient bandwidth, etc).

If hosting internally, it is important to note that the system will be dependent on internet connectivity to your server, and that in event of an outage only external users and visitors will lose access. This might prevent visitors accessing contribution forms or widgets embedded on external sites.

Other considerations are the secure partitioning of this internally-hosted website from other services on the same machine, security of network, and other factors including the cost of management and maintenance. It's recommended to have some expert guidance on doing this right.

External hosting

With internal expertise you could manage the install and configuration in-house, but host CiviCRM with an external provider. In this instance, we recommended you rent a VPS (Virtual Private Server) to ensure you have complete control of all packages and libraries (e.g. PHP, MySQL, etc), and are therefore able to configure it to your specific requirements.

Many shared hosts restrict the level of access you have, and may not support CiviCRM if you are unable to install the required pre-requisites. Shared hosts can also be prone to performance issues, as the hardware is shared between a group of customers with varying usage levels; if one customer's website suddenly receives a large spike in traffic, every website on that server could experience a lengthy outage.

Disadvantages aside, leasing space on a shared host is typically cheaper than a VPS, and both are subscription services on a monthly or annual basis (discounts may be available for longer leases.

We advise that you trial run any service for a short-term before committing to a longer period.

Existing hosting

If you are already using a website host, contact your provider to determine whether they support the packages and libraries required by CiviCRM. If they do not, there are two options available to you:

Migrate to another host

If your current host cannot accommodate CiviCRM you may want to consider migrating your CMS to a new host before installing CiviCRM. Depending on the CMS you are using, the process of moving from one host to another may be fairly straightforward. You are in a good position to transfer to another host if you can:

  1. request that your users stop creating and updating content during the migration,
  2. export and import all of the content from/to the chosen CMS,
  3. edit your DNS records to switch the 'pointers' to your website from the old host to the new host

Run the website and CiviCRM in parallel, on different servers

If you cannot move your website to a different host, you could purchase a second account on a host capable of running CiviCRM, and run the two systems alongside each other.

In this instance, you would use a CNAME DNS record to point to a second copy of the CMS and CiviCRM on the other host (e.g. civicrm.example.org), and link to it from your website, perhaps in form of a log-in button.

Aside from paying a second bill, one of the limitations to this approach is the need to clone the style of your website on the second host to give the visitor the illusion that they are in the same place. If changes to the style are changed, the work must be duplicated.